9217481 Nakanishi As part of an ongoing maintenance of the Research Facilities in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia, this proposal seeks the purchase of a 500 MHz multinuclear NMR Spectrometer. In this Department such equipment is needed by several groups. Nakanishi has elucidated the structures of over 160 bioactive compounds, many of them unstable and available in only microgram quantities. In recent years most NMR studies belonging to compounds in this category have been performed elsewhere because of inadequate instrumentation in this department. However, the nature of almost all the work being conducted in his group recently i.e., in biopolymers and the ultraminuscule scale structure determinations, makes the availability of an on-site high- field NMR instrument absolutely essential. His group has focused on the development and application of spectroscopic methods to structural studies; the proposed instrument will finally enable him to do the important NMR work here at Columbia. We have recently added two young faculty members who specialize in biopolymers, Professors Horne and McDermott, and the instrument will be essential for their work. Specifically McDermott's work has concerned ligand- protein interactions with large protein receptors, such as soluble domains from photosynthetic reaction centers, using both solid state and solution NMR. Existing instrumentation at Columbia is both inadequate and too heavily used for her to continue the solution state portion of these studies here. Horne has been very active in the area of triple helix formation of DNA, and is also working in the area of RNA-protein interactions. The research efforts of Professor Still, Breslow, Katz and Turro have been hampered by the fact that they have effectively abandoned structural analyses of certain exciting systems only because they are not well resolved on antiquated equipment. Other members of the synthetic organic and inorganic group, for example, Gilber t Stork, and others, will also make use of the instrument as research requires.
